Lucy and Dashiell Greene were the first kids in the neighborhood with a copy of the Terrorscraper board game. Most of their friends pretended not to envy them, quoting their parents in saying that setting up the whole thing was too complicated: it was a waste of time when the whole object of the game was for a player to upset the whole thing, and even if they did not manage to, it all had to be taken apart and put away anyhow.
Their friends pretended not to envy them, but the green-eyed monster was unmistakable.
The only other family in town with the game were the Hamelins over on Brock Lane, and no one really wanted to go over and pretend to make friends with Frankie Hamelin. He was, in the estimation of most, a snooty, spoiled, stuck-up suck-up. Besides that, his brother Kenny was weird in ways most of the kids (even those who heard the word “schizophrenia” tossed around in conversation by relatives and teachers) could not truly explain. So even if it meant a whole 12 kids in town would have gotten to play the game on any given day, everyone would still forego the ride up to Brock in favor of crowding around the Greene house that summer of 1976.
Kids would bribe, beg, bargain, even bludgeon, for a chance to join Lucy and Dashiell. An offer to share a pack of gum was often sufficient, but sometimes the choosing of the lucky four was a ritual as arcane as the selection of a new pope. Having been branded a tattletale any time between the start of nursery school and the present would, of course, put you completely out of the running. Too much flattery or excessive bowing and scraping could actually count against you. Flaunting the amount of your allowance in any way, even without knowing you did, was a major strike. Spilled soup on Lucy's friend Debbie Overholzer once in third grade? Nope! Offered Dashiell the pick of your Ronzi Monster cards? Sorry!
Of course, even if you went with the best of intentions, there was no guarantee. Playing Terrorscraper was not a matter of just laying out board and pieces. The set-up required surprisingly deep focus and much soldering. Dashiell had a soldering iron, but was only allowed to use it with the most direct adult supervision since the Easter Basket Fiasco of '72. Mr. Greene was not inclined to put himself out supervising or doing the required work, nor was Mrs. Greene. No, if anyone between Fontland Court and 6th Street wanted to play, they had to hope against hope that Lucy and Dashiell's Uncle Holly would be over. He was always willing to help out.
Holland Nathaniel Greene was six feet, eight inches tall, scrawny, always wearing slightly threadbare jeans and an assortment of shirts that had been out of fashion for a decade. The parents of the Greene's neighborhood, even those who knew him well, did not quite approve of him. It was not so much that they really thought he might be dangerous—plenty of men had come back from Vietnam a little odd—but that he was unattached. Free-wheeling, a lot of them said. Generous to a fault, said fault being he could not usually afford to give things or food or money away, and yet he did. He did little odd jobs here and there: mowing lawns, installing tile, repairing things. His most regular job was filling in if someone did not show up for a shift at the Greek diner he lived over.
The kids, meanwhile, all loved Uncle Holly. He always had what you needed. Fishing weights and lures, slivers of whetstone, a small reel of string for a kite, a stamp, some spare change for the ice cream truck—Holly had it all. He was nice too, really nice. He never talked down to you, and would listen to you complain about home or teachers or bullies or siblings without a word of reproach.
And, of course, he had his own soldering iron, ever ready in his truck should he be around on a Terrorscraper kind of afternoon.
Most of the time, if folks saw Holly on the Greene's street and asked where he was headed, he would roll off his oft-repeated reply that he was headed to see his niece and nephew. If he had felt a bit more brave, or if he had lived in a different place and time, maybe he would have admitted he was often just as much interested in checking on Lucy and Dashiell's mom, Susie Greene, but it was there and then, so he kept that part to himself.
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Susanna Greene, the former Susanna Metzger, had been engaged to Holly many years before, just as they finished high school. The future looked promising for the young couple at first; they were both academically gifted and dedicated to making something of themselves.
Then Holly's parents decided, since they already sent his older brother James off to college, that was enough higher education for the generation. Holly was bright, and his parents had made it clear throughout his school career that they would pay for his initial post secondary education. By the time they told him they had changed their minds (or rather mind, since they tended to be of one) it was too late to apply for scholarships, and the money Holly had saved from summer work and part-time jobs did not quite stretch to tuition since, the day he turned 18, he was expected to begin paying rent for his childhood room. Disheartened and down, Holly found an apprenticeship with an electrician, but then for reasons he never really explained, in spite of being softhearted guy who never liked violence, who as a child had been literally sickened at the thought of fighting, he went into the Army. He ended up in Vietnam, and while he was there, James moved in on Susie. She wrote to break their engagement, and Holly was home from his tour just in time to stand as his older brother's best man.
Holly never got over Susie, not really, but he would not dare do anything about it once she was married and apparently happy. He stood by and watched James be happy, and watched Susie seem happy.
Since he was paying attention, Holly was really the first one to see the cracks in the marriage. Long before everyone else in town was gossiping about how much time James spent away, Holly would mention in passing that he found his brother's frequent work and investing trips odd. Once Dashiell came along, Holly started to spend a lot of time at James and Susie's house. Of course that had people gossiping too, though some dared to say it was kind of him to help out his sister-in-law when she was so often alone with a baby. He never actually spent the night, but it was known he slept in his truck parked discreetly at the end of Fontland Court. For Holly, it was about more than his undying feelings for Susie, or about some colloquially chivalrous desire to protect a woman and children. See, he got it into his head when Dashiell was still small that Susie was and might always be out of her depth with the whole parenting trip and that James was the same sort of asshole their own dad had been. He was no parent himself, but Holly always figured the least he could do was be there to give his nephew and niece some extra attention. Some of the guys around town razzed James, telling him to watch out; his scarecrow of a brother might try to mess around, but James never seemed to mind. He trusted Holly, and anyway, the younger Greene brother always being around meant less time he had to spend with his own kids.
By the time Dashiell was five, about the only time James spent with him was taking him down to the dump on Saturdays or Sundays, just as Old Man Greene had done with James and Holly, showing the little guy the fine family art of winging rats with a .22 while your dad sat back and got sloshingly drunk, screeching at you every time you missed a shot.
So they went along like that, Holly wandering over when he was free to check on things, to help Susie with all the little things around the house that James was always too busy for.
In that summer of 1976, the visits were getting fewer and shorter. Holly had found his feet at last, doing not only his odd job work, but getting himself hired on part-time with the electrician who had trained him back in the day. He was also, quietly, dating Maria, the daughter of the family whose diner he lived over. People laughed to see them out—Maria was just five-foot-four to Holly's six-foot-eight—but for the first time in a while, Holly seemed to be really happy. He had even intimated to some folks that during a recent trip to Cincinnati, he had gone ring shopping. For a lot of people who counted themselves as something like friends of Holly, this was good news. The gentle giant who had spent so much time sort of drifting through life was at last going to be settled.
Some, of course, were indifferent to Holly's apparent happiness. Not everyone, even in a small town, cares about the personal life of everyone around them. Holly's older brother James Greene, for example, was, as mentioned, a busy, busy man, far too busy with work and poker and fishing and dragging his son out to shoot rats at the dump to care what Holly was up to. James had a lot going on, so he had little time to even think about his “failure” brother in any context. He had his life set out the way he wanted it. The good old nine-to-five five days a week for most of the year, minus a few business trips and two weeks of vacation—alone, of course, because Susie and the kids undoubtedly would have cramped his style—plus little weekend trips over to Michigan and Indiana to check on real estate investments and various other pies he had fingers in.
If there was anyone in town who cared about Holly's relationship but who was actively unhappy about it, that would be Susie Greene. She had never gotten over making what she now perceived as the wrong choice, and when she was a few gimlets deep at a bridge party, she let her friends know.
“Of course Jim is successful, but I could live in a newspaper shack and be happy with Holland,” she would unfailingly grouse.
Someone would gently remind her the expression was “tar paper shack” and that would set Susanna to sobbing and that would often wind up the party.
Susie had never been happier than in her youthful days with Holly. She had married James for the sense of stability and because she figured, as brothers, the two must be alike. Of course, they were alike only so far as they shared parents and a very mild brotherly resemblance and slightly unusual heights—James was only three inches shorter than Holly. So Susie made what she would later see as the mistake of her life, and perhaps of her children's lives, and despite the growing normality of divorce, she felt decidedly trapped, especially once it was clear that Holly had truly moved on with Maria.
She had done what was expected of her in the time and place she grew up, and now she could not even imagine creating a new life for herself.
A lot of the moms and aunts and older sisters in town were just like Susie Greene in many ways but most of them, and most of us, did not really know that then.
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The weekend of the 4th of July was messy for the town in 1976, what with the usual stuff being compounded by the Bicentennial. The fireworks show out at the lake was supposed to be the biggest and best ever.
Then someone made off with a greater part of the supplies and set it all off two days early out in Groff's Woods.
Luckily there was no major fire, but the volunteer firefighters still spent Friday evening and most of Saturday out spraying stuff down. That meant a last minute decision by said volunteers not to march in the parade on Sunday. That would have been fine, really, except that it was the firefighters more than the police who often defaulted to keeping things calm at public events.
Boy, did that year's parade need calming.
The parade itself never failed to be a bit of a mess, with people complaining up until the last second about marching order, how ornate their floats could or could not be, and about how others clearly benefited from favoritism in terms of said ornate styling or marching position. Kids were always challenging each other to dash closer and closer to the vehicles and floats in the quest for candy, and even after Pete Carlin got knocked down one year by the convertible carrying Miss Coal Tar 1973, no one bothered to try to hold their kids back. The parade of '76 was even messier and less organized than usual anyway, since it was beefed up with two different groups of men, one from the next town over, vaguely costumed as soldiers from the Revolutionary War. Well, really they were dressed up in bits and bobs deemed “close enough,” mostly liberated from family attics and the little theater. They all showed up at least six drinks deep and ended up more wandering than following the route, trying to pitch candy less toward the spectators than at them.
Just as things were reaching their peak, Walt Corle got beaned with a Rosalie Cherry-Malt Cluster and started bleeding from the ear, and his mom pitched a fit and shook up most of the crowd between Brandner Place and the Oliorion Theatre. It turned out later that Walt was bleeding because the edge of the packet nicked his ear, but Mrs. Corle still kept him home the rest of the summer. Walt was Dashiell's best buddy, at least that year, and while him not being around meant there would regularly be an extra space open for Terrorscraper, it also made Dashiell more surly than usual.
When Dashiell was feeling surly, everyone stayed away as best they could and thanked their lucky stars that they were not a small animal in the vicinity of the Greene house.
For a lot of the neighborhood, it was no difficult thing to stay away from the Greene place right after the Fourth. The police and fire department did their best, but no one could figure our who had stolen all those fireworks and burned down Groff's Woods. A bunch of the parents in town simply grounded their kids, mostly keeping them home doing chores or copying sentences or studying ahead for the next school year or whatever. Typical what-are-we-going-t0-do-about-the-other-generation bunk, but it made them feel in control, I guess. A few kids, mostly those whose parents knew where their kids had been—a rare thing many days back then—or didn't care, or would never suspect their little darlings of misbehavior, or the kids who had unavoidable reasons like summer jobs or lessons for being out and about in the daytime, escaped the Great Grounding of '76.
A couple weeks after the Fourth, the cops said that the fireworks must have been taken by either a drifter or hooligans, but there was really no way to know. They said maybe we would never know, unless someone confessed.
(No one did until 1992, and even then it was an accidental death bed confession, so there was nothing to be done about it.)
Most of the kids still being kept home were free after that, and a few dared to go around the Greene place to see if there might be a game of Terrorscraper in the offing. It was a decent enough day, nice and hot, but the main paths from town to the usual cooling off spots, the creek and Joel Mayner's pond, were through Groff's Woods. The better part of Groff's Woods was still a burned out mess, and Antonia Groff had hired some guys from Cleveland to come out and clean the place up with heavy equipment, thus leaving the area temporarily forbidden for actual safety reasons. Therefore, why not a quite afternoon playing board games? A few kids, like Ike Edelbach and Morris Lane, had faced the particular wrath of a mopey Dashiell Greene before, and so they dared to head instead up to the Hamelin place. Even Frankie would be better than Dashiell in a bad mood.
Later on, after everything that happened, Morris would say that as he rode his bike up to Brock Lane, he had seen Frankie's brother Kenny Hamelin walking the other way, head down, maybe talking to himself. Fred Carlin, out on his way to the store for his mom, saw Kenny too, and called out to him.
“Hey, Ken!”
Fred told everyone that Kenny had stared at him a moment in that glassy way, waved, and then called out to tell him to watch out for 'the G-men.'
A little after lunch, Danny Edelbach went over to the Greene house, his little sister Katina toddling in his wake. Danny was older than most of the kids who usually wanted to play Terrorscraper, 13 to Dashiell's 11 and Lucy's nine, but that summer he was without friends since Eddie Lake had died of leukemia the winter before and the Reits had moved to Cincinnati. Katina turned three that day, and she was all dressed up in a little lavender dress, and Danny figured she could be his in to a possible game of Terrorscraper, since Lucy, who had always wanted a sister, treated the little girl like a living doll. Mrs. Greene turned Danny away, politely, at the door. Dashiell was in trouble for something involving a squirrel and some scavenged firecrackers earlier that morning, and Lucy was at the Overholzer's for her piano lesson. As always with adults, Danny was scrapingly polite, thanking Mrs. Greene and apologizing for bothering her. He promised, when charged with the great task, that he would ask his parents to call and let the Greenes know if they would be over Friday night for cake and Tripoley, then even took Katina's hand and nicely led her back to the sidewalk with him.
Later on, Danny admitted he had been hoping, even if he did not get to play Terrorscraper, that he would at least be able to dump Katina there for a while with Lucy so he could slip off down to the movies for a while. Eddie Lake's older sister Peggy worked at the Lyric, and she would always let Eddie's friends in for less, or even free. Danny was pissed once he heard Mrs. Greene close the front door, since he might well be stuck with 'the baby' for the rest of the afternoon, and if there was anything he hated, it was babysitting. A few steps away from the front gate of the Greene house, he turned off the good boy act, pulling away from his little sister and shooing her.
“Bug off, little shit.”
Then Danny turned and just headed for the movies, leaving his little sister alone. On nearly any other day this might not have seemed like, or been, a big deal. Some of the adults would have shaken their heads since it was Katina's birthday and they would figure that sort of treatment must have hurt her feelings. But then, Katina at just three was already pretty damn tough, used to her brothers being shitty to her. She was also a well-behaved little kid, so the minute she found herself alone, she figured she should go home to her mom. Rosa Edelbach, as much as any parent in town, was relaxed with letting her kids run loose, but she always told Danny or Ike or both, if their baby sister went out with them, to keep an eye out, and she always told Katina to stay near her brothers. Since Danny had told her to bug off, Katina took that as a direct instruction to go home and play in the yard a while.
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Just about the time Katina was making her way home as quickly as any easily distracted toddler might, Uncle Holly and Kenny Hamelin were also both headed along Fontland Court from opposite directions, Holly from Pine Avenue, Kenny from Quarry Lane. Holly actually passed the movie-bound Danny, but they simply nodded to each other. The car that would soon play a role in the afternoon's great drama passed Kenny up at a crawl. He noted it particularly because it was brown, and just lately brown cars were the sort that worried him; he figured they were from the government, come to take kids away.
Being a well-behaved, well-taught three-year-old, Katina paused when it came time for her to cross the street toward her own home. She looked both ways, was careful stepping down from the curb, and kept looking as she went across. This comes not from her own recollection, since she was only three and barely remembers much of what happened, but from the recollections of her mom, who had just stepped out onto their front porch to sit for a moment and catch her breath after a morning of cleaning, and of Holly, who came within sight just as Katina stepped out onto the street. Everything seemed fine, and Rosa Edelbach smiled and moved to head down the front walk and meet her daughter. She was also, in her head, planning to give both Danny and Ike a solid talking to that night about leaving their little sister all on her own. She never worried too badly about her kids, at least not up to that day, but seeing her baby alone did make her heart tremble just briefly.
The trembling became a hammering when a brown car came crawling along the street and then suddenly sped up, heading right for Katina.
Katina does, to this day, remember the roar of the car speeding up, tearing toward her, and she remembers freezing up, flinching, and scraping her palms when she fell on the street, the car stopping just short of striking her. Most of all she remembers the driver lunging out, coming around not to check on her, but to grab her up and move to shove her into the passenger's seat of the car.
She remembers hearing her mother scream.
Rosa rushed down onto the street and managed to get a hold on the driver, dragging him momentarily away from the car. He rounded on her and he tried to slug her, but he was off balance and his own momentum was against him. She ducked past him, almost managing to get Katina back out of the car, but the guy recovered, yanking Rosa back and shoving her.
Holly, who had broken from his usual long amble into a sprint when he saw the situation going down, caught Rosa up from behind, keeping her on her feet and reaching past to grab the stranger by the collar. While Rosa scrambled to pull her little girl out of the car, Holly boxed the guy in against the side of it.
“Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you think you're doing?”
Just as Rosa straightened up out of the car with a wailing Katina in her arms, Kenny happened upon the scene, took one look at the situation, and let out a screech as he rushed over to snake past Holly and deck the guy.
“You can't take kids!” Kenny screamed, and the guy went down with a scream.
While Rosa was carrying Katina into the house and neighbors were assembling nearby to gawk, Holly stepped back a little and let Kenny give the guy a few solid kicks in the slats before intervening. Someone called the cops, and by the time they got there the guy was begging to go with them; anything to be away from what he no doubt perceived as a giant and a madman. They hauled him away, and Kenny too in a separate car, and they talked to Holly there in the street while they waited for Jock to arrive with his truck and tow the brown car away.
The guy did not end up doing any time; the court decided he could have just been trying to check on Katina after he thought he knocked her down with his car. Katina herself could barely testify, and the public defender, Tamerlane Barstow, used the idea of Rosa being a panicked, hysterical mom, Holly being a 'drifter,' and Kenny being mentally unstable as proof of the whole thing being a misunderstanding. When that same guy was shot dead a few years later when the cops were after him for having done some really awful shit to little kids, and it turned out he had a juvenile record of such behavior too…
Well, by then the incident was a decade past. Tamerlane was in the state senate, well away from the town that everyone knew had just been, for him, a sleepy backwater to cut his teeth in. The guy was away from this mortal coil, unable to hurt more kids.
Things settled down quick right after, though plenty of parents were more careful about letting their kids, especially the really little ones, be out and about all day without checking in regularly. No one really clamped down, except maybe the Edelbachs. Danny and Ike were both grounded for a while, Danny for longer since he had been the one who had left Katina alone. For a lot of the rest of us who had little brothers and sisters, our parents got a lot more strict about how we looked after them.
Holly married his fiancée, Maria, in the spring of '77. Joe Edelbach, still endlessly grateful to Holly, provided a wedding cake from his bakery, free of charge. The wedding party was pretty stacked with her family, though Holly did ask his brother James to be his best man. Of course, James had business over in Indiana all that week, so it was a no-go. One of Maria's brothers stepped in. Lucy was a flower girl. Dashiell was supposed to be in the wedding too, but he was acting kind of sick that morning and so he stayed home. Susie was at the wedding, of course, and there were running bets on whether she would speak now or forever hold.
She held. It was not her time to break, then.
Holly and Maria had their first kid, Stephen, in '79, just around the same time Joe and Rosa Edelbach's last kid, David—Curly to most everyone—was born. Stevie Greene and Curly Edelbach ended up pretty good pals, starting when they were in the same kindergarten class. When Stevie went missing in '90, Curly followed his dad over to Holly and Maria's place and begged to join in on the search party. Holly sat him down with a glass of pop and told him to just stay at their house and help man the phone, in case Stevie called. When the poor kid fell asleep, his dad took him home. When it all came out in '93 that Stevie had been one of Dashiell's first human victims, Curly got really angry and threatened, all of nearly-14, to get to Cleveland by any means necessary and get vengeance for his lost friend. It was Katina, visiting home from Chicago with her partner Lu, who sat him down and told him to wait things out.
Better to see if maybe this time something like justice could happen.
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Town has changed by now. Bigger, of course, though not by much. The former Groff's woods is a bar, a strip mall, and a laundromat now. Mayner's pond was filled in after the mess of Dashiell having used it as a dump site, and now the land just sits there. Kids these days say it's haunted. Those of us who grew up with Dashiell are inclined to agree.
Frankie and Kenny Hamelin still live at their parents' old place. Kenny is in a good place, on medication that helps him a lot and with a live-in aid who gets on well with everyone. Frankie is on his second wife; no one was sure he would move on after Lucy, and it took a good twenty years, but now they have had a decade together. She is good with his kids and with Kenny, and her kids call Frankie 'Dad,' so I guess everyone is happy there.
Holly died in 2000; cancer. Maria runs her family's diner now, along with a couple of her brothers. Holly Jr., her youngest son, helps out with the books. He looks a lot like his dad, but shorter.
Susie moved out to California when she and James divorced during Dashiell's trial. She does not keep in touch with anyone back here, really. There was a little while in about 2005 when she had to come back, after James died and the truth about all his doings and dealings came to light. The cops wondered if she had ever known what he was up to.
A lot of us here in town wonder as well.
Of course Katina splits time between New York and California, busy busy busy, but she comes home now and again. When she published that little memoir a couple of years ago, she dedicated it to the people of her home town, and that was a big deal for a while. We're all pretty proud of her, and of Curly too, doing so well in Chicago with his music.
The town has changed, the times have changed. Plenty of people are bothered about that, but I figure things have to change. Better for things to move forward, you know? For all the bad, and even all the good, of the past to stay behind us.
All original contents © L. Richmond, 2025-